Notes:

August 2008- I deserve a lot of credit for bravery, after remastering and reviewing the tapes I’m posting the mp3s.

Some of the vocals are horrendous, both Curt and I are very repetitious in our writing licks and solos, the sound is so-so, but here it is, warts and all.This was the first album, and we were all very green in the studio.

We had done test stuff with my old Teac 4-track, but moving up to 8 really opened possibilities for us to realize some of the stuff we had always wanted to do, although we quickly ran into problems with too few tracks even with 8.

Chuck had just joined us, and didn’t play double bass, so we were unable to record Cry Havoc/Hellrazor or Fear No Man, two of the four (with Predator and HMSQ) songs we had written and recorded with Curt’s brother David on drums.

Fear No Man never did make it onto an Vengeance release. By the time we got around to recording the medley, Curt had left the band so I discarded Hellrazor, not much of a song anyway, just a lick basically, and expanded Cry Havoc for the Malicious Intent project.

I wrote Arrakis and Traveler myself, then worked out the arrangements with Curt and Chuck. Overkill, Streetwalker, FTW, Foxholes and Full Frontal Assault were based on simple riff ideas by Curt and worked out with the band. Curt would come up with great licks all the time, I would just grab one he seemed to like and build off it, and we would jam out a song. Adding lyrics often influenced the structures.

I wrote Running Blind with Brat guitarist Bruce Batton. Bruce was a friend of ours from a band Mike had joined after leaving Vengeance years before, and whom Curt’s brother David (our drummer before Chuck), had just joined, although Mike was no longer with them. I ended up throwing out his parts and writing my own song. Interestingly, he did the same thing, throwing out my parts and rewriting the song for his band, with a different title and lyrics.

I played lead guitar on Running Blind and took a solo on Predator, as well as doing the stacked guitar work on Traveler, something I had been experimenting with for a while on my four-track. I was always an admirer of Brian May’s stacked work, as well as some of the stuff Jimmy Page had done, especially “Ten Years Gone” and “Achilles Last Stand” and it influenced me greatly.

Although the bass parts in Vengeance songs were interesting, sometimes I felt a bit constrained trapped on bass. I was originally a guitarist who had been roped into playing bass because our bass player had quit in the middle of a tour with contracted bookings still outstanding, and I knew all the parts, so ended up playing gigs we had scheduled.

I had always intended on returning to guitar when we got a bass player, but then when we added Mike, a longtime friend and original member of Vengeance, and I was stuck on bass.

But it worked out well and I was able to keep my hand in by playing guitar in the studio, and since I was singing lead I felt it would have been too much for me to have been one of the lead guitarists as well. Let everyone have a chance to shine, and and all that.

Mike and I had collaborated on re-recording some Queen songs (we were and are big Queen freaks) to experiment with stacking vocals and working out complicated harmonies. He and I did a limited amount of backing vocal work on Predator (Arrakis and Streetwalker) but got much more into it when he actually joined the band for the next project.

All in all, Predator didn’t come out too bad considering what we had to work with. There are some uncomfortable vocal moments for me though, looking back on it now, however. The same tour our bassist had quit, the lead vocalist had left shortly after, so I took over lead vocals as well.

This project was the first time I’d done extensive lead vocals, although I used to sing a few songs in the old Vengeance sets, and we were trying some really ambitious stuff, along the lines of Maiden and Dio, although not with that vocal range. I think I did pretty well, but its far from my best effort.

Things would get better on the next few projects, though.